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API vs Data Warehouse

API vs Data Warehouse

Both the API and the Data Warehouse are ways to extract data from CampusGroups.

API

The API does allow you to automatically extract data from the system and feed it into other systems on campus (including your campus data warehouse). Most schools use this option, but the data sets are a bit more limited than what the data warehouse option offers. 

The Data Warehouse

The data warehouse offers access to a lot more system data in raw format (requiring foreign key connections between tables).
Use of the Data Warehouse requires a good understanding of the platform data flows.

  • To access the Data Warehouse, please go to the Admin menu. The Data Warehouse is located under the Settings submenu.

  • You will be able to request all sorts of data, as can be seen on the screenshot below.

  • The question mark to the left of each field allows you to view each data set's fields.

 

As an example, we will pull the users' data from the platform:

  1. Click on Users

  2. Retrieve the report parameter from the url:

  3. The preferred authentication method is to add a custom HTTP header to the request named "X-CG-API-Secret" that contains your secret key. For example here is how you would do this in Postman:

The Data Warehouse page also includes additional instructions on how you may authenticate if your API client does not support custom HTTP headers.